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commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world.
That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and
voted up or down.

Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted
to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning,
there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

While they are few config options and even fewer useful details regarding what actually is being sent by the time machine 'backupd' process, this can at least tell you its doing something, how much it's doing, and exactly how often. Via macosxhints, http://xrl.us/begrwa, which in turn was via comments

This was gotten from http://www.veen.com/jeff/archives/000573.html. The line will grab all the mp3 files on the urls listed in text file sourceurls.txt (one url per line) . A much more complete breakdown of the line can be found at the web site mentioned above.

These days, most software distributed in tar files will just contain a directory at the top level, but some tar files don't have this and can leave you with a mess of files in the current folder if you blindly execute

tar zxvf something.tar.gz

This command can help you clean up after such a mistake. However, note that this has the potential to do bad things if someone has been *really* nasty with filenames.

The "vorbiscomment" utility lets you update information such as artist names and song and album tags in an Ogg Vorbis file. You can use this command to fix any mistakes that were made when ripping an album.

Upgraded Debian/Ubuntu/etc. systems may have a number of "orphaned" packages which are just taking up space, which can be found with the "deborphan" command. While you could just do "dpkg --purge $(deborphan)", the act of purging orphans will often create more orphans. This command will get them all in one shot.

Enter your ssh public key in the remote end for future key-based authentication. Just type your password one last time. The next time you should be able to login with the public key. If you don't have a key, generate one with ssh-keygen.

This command will generate white noise through your speakers (assuming you have sound enabled). It's good for staying focused, privacy, coping with tinnitus, etc. I use it to test that the sound works.

While copying a large file that may take up a good chunk of your hard drive, start the copy and run this command concurrently. It will print out the disk information every second. It's pretty handy when you have a large copy with nothing to monitor the progress.